DISAPPEARANCE

Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, July 1945.

He climbed out of the car and waved a farewell to the man behind the wheel. “Good night, Fred. See you at work tomorrow.”

Fred grimaced. “Don’t remind me, Doug. After all the fun we had on our fishing trip, it’s going to be hard to get back to the old routine. Well, good night.”

Doug Crandall waved again, and the car pulled away from the curb, purring off into the summer night. Gathering up his fishing tackle and the string of bass, Doug started toward the door of the two-story apartment house in which he lived. Eagerness flowed into him at the thought of how delighted Vickie would be when she saw his catch.

As Doug approached the house, he glanced up at the windows on the second floor. They were dark. The windows of the first floor apartment, in which the Masons lived, were dark, too. It was just a little after nine—too early for either Vickie or the Masons to have gone to bed. Doug decided most likely Vickie had gone to a movie with the Masons.

Doug found his apartment dark. He switched on the lights and looked into the bedroom. Vickie was not there. He went into the kitchen, thinking she might have left a note. But he did not find one, and he consoled himself with the thought that Vickie had probably expected to be home before him.

He decided to make some coffee while waiting for Vickie to return. Emptying out the glass coffee maker in the sink, he noticed the brown rim that had formed on the inside, near the bottom. Queer—looked as though it hadn’t been used for some time.

Something began to stir in a dark, dank corner of Doug’s mind as other little discordances jarred upon him. Looking into the refrigerator for cold cuts with which to make a sandwich, he saw that the interior was very bare. If Vickie had done her Saturday shopping, it would have been filled with things to eat.

Then Doug remembered that the bed had not been made when he had glanced into the bedroom. It wasn’t like Vickie, for she kept the apartment almost painfully neat.

Little things—a ring of sediment on the inside of a coffee maker, a refrigerator that had not been stocked, a bed that had not been made. But they assumed a terrible importance to Doug Crandall. And suddenly the old fear was back, whispering in his mind, gnawing at his heart.

Doug began to smoke cigarettes, glancing continuously at his watch. When the coffee was done, he drank it black. And then, unable longer to remain seated, he rose and began to pace the floor.

He kept glancing at his watch. Ten-thirty. Then eleven o’clock. Anxiety mounted within him as the minutes passed.

Once he turned on the television set in the living room, but he was unable to find an interest in any of the programs, and shortly he switched it off. He resumed his nervous pacing.

A little after eleven-thirty, Doug heard a car draw up in the front of the house. That would be the Masons, returning home. Doug listened eagerly. There was the sound of footsteps, the creak of an opening door. Then there was silence.

Doug strained with the intensity of his listening. If Vickie had gone out with the Masons, she would now be coming up the stairs. There would be the sharp sound of her small heels in the hall, the click of her key in the lock. But as the tense seconds passed, they did not come.

At eleven forty-five, Doug was unable to bear longer the silence and the fruitless waiting. He descended the stairs, knocked on the Masons’ door.

Ted Mason opened the door, clutching a bathrobe about him. The sleepiness left his eyes as he became aware of the strained whiteness of Doug’s face.

“Why, Doug, you look…say, anything wrong? Come on in.”

“It’s Vickie!” Doug burst out a moment later, as he confronted Ted and Paula Mason in their living room. “She’s gone. I…I’m afraid something happened to her.” The words spilling out erratically, he told of his coming home from the fishing trip and finding the house strangely neglected. “I thought maybe she had gone out with you,” he finished.

Paula Mason shook her blond curls. “No, Doug, she didn’t. The last time I saw Vickie was yesterday…Saturday…in the morning. Ted was taking me shopping in the car, and I came up to ask if Vickie wanted to go along. But she wasn’t feeling well. She said she’d get some things, later, from one of the neighborhood grocery stores. I came up again, in the afternoon, but there was no answer to my knocks, and I thought Vickie had gone out somewhere.”

Doug was staring into space. “Didn’t feel well—” he muttered. “She had a headache Friday night, when I left. It didn’t seem important, then. But if Vickie had taken sick, why hadn’t she stayed home?”

Ted and Paula Mason returned Doug’s anxiously questioning gaze helplessly. Some of the alarm which he felt was beginning to show in their faces.

“Maybe Vickie went out to do a little shopping, and maybe she got sick, and—”

Ted Mason’s hesitant voice broke off, as though he feared to continue.

“That might be it,” Doug whispered. “She went out to do some shopping, probably fainted, was taken to a hospital—”

Abruptly, he shook his head and sat down in a nearby chair. He looked at something beyond the Masons, beyond the room, still shaking his head. There was an intent blankness in his eyes.

He could not ignore the old fear any longer. Vickie’s disappearance was not so easily to be explained. He’d had what he felt certain all along was the answer, but he hadn’t wanted to admit it, not even to himself. Now he realized, with a flooding of despair, that he had to face the facts.

Doug spoke slowly, haltingly. “Ted, Paula…I’m afraid there’s more to this than it would seem. I…I’m afraid I’ll never see Vickie again.” He took a deep breath. “You’ve heard of the Alderdale disappearances?”

“Why, yes,” Ted Mason admitted. “It’s still something of a sensation. But, Doug, what on Earth has that got to do with Vickie?”

“Vickie and I are from Aiderdale,” Doug replied simply. “We left like a great many others, when the disappearances started. Vickie and I had just been married. It had seemed so important that nothing should happen to us. We came here, to the city, and I got another job.”

Doug looked at his nervously twisting hands, and for a moment he did not voice the thoughts that leaped and flickered within his mind, like shadows thrown on a wall by a fitful flame. Alderdale—just a little Illinois town, not much different from all the other little towns scattered the length and breadth of the country. He and Vickie had been born in Alderdale. They had grown up together, gone to the same schools. They had gone to parties together, picnics, dances. It was only natural and logical that they should have married in the end.

Life in Alderdale had been good, flowing gently, easily, like a lazy, little stream. Then, a little over two years ago, the disappearances had started. Girls and young men, just having reached maturity, began to vanish into thin air. They were never heard from again. Investigations of the most exhaustive and authoritative kind had gotten nowhere.

People had begun to leave Alderdale. Doug and Vickie had eventually joined the exodus. Leaving had been hard, but the danger had been real and very near.

Doug looked up from his hands. His ravaged face was bitter.

“Leaving Alderdale didn’t do any good,” he went on. “Whatever happened to all those others, it caught up with us even here.”

“But how can you be sure?” Paula Mason demanded protestingly. “The disappearances were highly localized—and you’re a great distance from Alderdale now. Vickie had a headache. Perhaps it was the first stage of some illness. She might have gone out to do a little shopping, fainted from the effort, and was taken to a hospital.”

“The police, Doug,” Ted Mason put in with clumsy gentleness. “The police would have been notified in that event. Your name and address would have been found among the contents of Vickie’s purse. Maybe the police called here while we all were away.”

Doug rose from the chair in abrupt, desperate eagerness. “I’ll try them. There might be a chance.”

“I’ll take you in my car,” Ted Mason offered.

“No, Ted. I’d hate to bother you with this any more than I have already.”

Ted Mason began pulling his bathrobe off. “I’ll be ready in a minute,” he said with firm finality.

Ted Mason, when he had dressed, paused only long enough to give Paula a hug that brought a gasp of surprise and pleasure from her lips. It was as though he had suddenly discovered something of great value in a possession hitherto regarded a commonplace. Then he threw an arm in rough masculine sympathy over Doug’s shoulder, steered quickly for the door.

* * * *

The police sergeant was conscientiously thorough. He checked station records, inquired at headquarters for precinct reports, called the county hospital and all the others to which Vickie might have been taken. But in every case he drew a blank.

“Doesn’t look as though your wife had taken sick while out shopping,” the sergeant said, his voice gruff with an awkward sympathy at the anxiety in Doug’s face. “There must be some other explanation. I’ll check on possibilities, and have a look-out order for her issued. In the meantime, you’d better return home and get some rest. I’ll call you as soon as anything turns up.”

Doug nodded dully, and with Ted Mason a silent figure of commiseration beside him, left the station. He stopped outside, on the sidewalk, his face forlornly resigned.

“I expected that,” he told Ted Mason. “Vickie’s gone—just as all those others from Alderdale are gone.”

Ted Mason said with restrained impatience, “But Pete’s sake, Doug, this is the city. Just because Vickie’s from Alderdale, it doesn’t mean the disappearances caught up with her here.”

“Then what other explanation is there?” Doug demanded.

Ted Mason shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. But I do know that jumping to conclusions isn’t going to help you any.”

“I’m not jumping to conclusions,” Doug insisted. “I’m right, Ted. I know I’m right. I can feel it all the way down deep inside me.”

“You’re taking this too hard, Doug.” Ted Mason reached out an encircling arm. “Try to get a grip on yourself. Maybe this will come out all right. We’ll go back to the house now. A little rest will do you good.”

Doug shook his head. Thought of returning to the apartment, so silent and empty now without Vickie, was somewhat revolting.

“But it’s late!” Ted Mason pointed out protestingly. “Where else can you go!”

“I’ll just walk around a while. I feel like walking. I feel like doing a lot of walking.”

“For Pete’s sake!” Ted Mason gripped Doug’s arms hard. “Stop it! Hear me? Now look—we’re going back to the house. A call might come in, and you’d better be there if it does. Suppose someone called while you were out walking?” It was this that won Doug over. He sighed, nodded wearily, allowed himself to be led to the car.

Back at the apartment, Doug went quickly from room to room, impelled by the wild hope that Vickie might somehow miraculously have returned. But each room was still as barren of her presence as the last.

He began pacing the floor and smoking cigarettes. It was as though he hoped, by the mere act of walking and smoking, to keep at bay the fear that stalked within him. He kept glancing at the phone in an alcove near the door, holding his breath, then releasing it as he looked away.

Vickie—The thought whispered urgently, pleadingly, in his mind. Vickie—what happened? Vickie—what was it that took you away?

Alderdale, an answering whisper came. Alderdale, where girls and young men just over the borderline of maturity vanished into air. The thing behind those disappearances—the thing which might have reached across the miles between the city and the town, reached and struck, even here.

Doug tried to shut that other whisper out of his mind, but it persisted, became overbearing in its triumph over the futile efforts of his will. It mocked him with its presence, taunted him with dark suggestions, hideous insinuations.

The night wore on. Weariness became a weight in Doug’s legs. His throat was raw from smoking. Sheer exhaustion finally pulled him to the sofa. He decided to rest a while. Just a while.

The sofa was soft. It was a cloud bearing him weightlessly through space. The weight spread from his legs, reached his eyelids, pulled them down. The whispering was stilled.

Doug opened his eyes to the dazzle of sunlight. He blinked frowningly, dimly aware that an insistent sound had awakened him. The sound was repeated. Someone was knocking at the door.

It was Paula Mason, bearing a tray laden with dishes. She said almost shyly, “Just thought I’d bring up something to eat.” She didn’t wait for his reaction, but brushed quickly past him, set the tray down on the kitchen table, and began to bustle about with an energy that clearly would brook no objections.

Doug cleared his throat. “This is swell of you, Paula. Really swell.”

“You sit down and eat,” Paula Mason said briskly. “Men never talk sense until they’re fed.”

It wasn’t until Doug started on the food that he realized how hungry he was. Then he had to restrain himself from wolfing it down.

“You’ve made the place a mess,” Paula Mason said, her voice still brisk. “Coffee grounds all over the sink, cigarette stubs everywhere.” She began to tidy the kitchen, not glancing at him. Her energy seemed boundless.

Doug felt a glow of gratitude. He knew Paula’s briskness was merely a pretense made in an effort to put him at ease.

Finally he was finished. He found his cigarettes, lighted one.

Paula Mason finished straightening the apartment, and began to gather up the dishes. The briskness had gone from her. The concern which it had hidden now showed clearly on her face.

“Doug, what are you going to do?” she asked, when the contents of the tray had been replaced.

Doug lifted his hands helplessly. “I wish I knew. It all seems to depend on the police. They said they’d call me up if they learned anything. The city is still pretty much of a puzzle to me, and I don’t know where else I can turn.”

“Don’t you have any friends from Alderdale living here in the city? One of them might know something about Vickie.”

“I know of several. But, Paula, I don’t think there’s any hope in that direction.”

“You could find out,” Paula insisted.

Doug hesitated in aching indecision. “But if someone should call while I was out—”

“I’ll leave the doors open, up here and downstairs, so that I’ll be able to hear the phone or the doorbell if they should ring. Don’t worry about that, Doug.”

He decided to act on the possibility, futile as it seemed. He washed, changed his clothing, and armed with addresses copied on a sheet of paper, set out.

* * * *

Doug took a deep breath and pressed the first doorbell. Now that he was actually about it, a wistful eagerness filled him.

The door opened to reveal the wary face of a young woman. At sight of Doug, the wariness vanished to be replaced by a smile of surprise. “Why, Doug Crandall! Of all people. Aren’t you working? Where’s Vickie?”

“That’s what I came to find out, Ruth. You see, Vickie… Vickie has disappeared.”

A gasp of shocked dismay left Ruth’s lips. “Doug—no! Not Vickie?” Her hand flew to her face as though the horror which flooded it was a sudden stab of pain. There was something personal about her reaction, called out not so much by Doug’s misfortune as by its effect upon some deep-rooted fear of her own.

“Alderdale,” Ruth breathed, “Doug—Alderdale.”

Doug nodded somberly. “That’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t see what else could have taken Vickie away.”

“Oh, Doug, is there no escape?” Ruth’s voice was almost a tearful wail. “We…we come here to the city to get away from it—the disappearances—and it’s no use. All the boys and girls we knew and went to school with—gone. And now…now Vickie.”

Escape. Doug wondered if there actually was no escape. He remained a while in an effort to calm the disturbance his visit had created. Then he continued on his quest, apprehensive now as to how the others would receive his news. He determined to be more subtle in his approach. Just a casual question. Seen Vickie? Oh, nothing important. Got the day off, but Vickie wasn’t home. Thought she might have dropped over.

He repeated the question many times, gave the same explanation many times again. None had seen Vickie. There were many invitations for him and Vickie to come and visit. Other than that, Doug got no results.

From one address to another, from one side of the city to another. Not all were married and home, like Ruth, to answer his call. Many were employed. But he was supplied with telephone numbers and he put in calls to offices and shops. He varied his approach in such cases, always careful not to cause alarm.

Results at one address brought an abrupt end to his quest. It was late afternoon by then. He had come to a furnished apartment building, in which two girls from Alderdale lived. The woman who answered Doug’s ring explained that the girls did not live there any more.

“One of them disappeared, you see. Just vanished. It was all very strange. The other girl went all to pieces over it. She mentioned Alderdale, that town where so many people disappeared. That’s why it seemed so strange. I’ve often wondered if there were any connection. I told my husband—”

“The other girl—what became of her?” Doug broke in.

“Oh, she packed her things and went away. Said she wanted to put as much distance between herself and Alderdale as possible.”

“I see,” Doug muttered. “Thanks.” He turned away with unconscious curtness, his entire being engulfed by what he had learned. It was not only Vickie, then. There were others. Many people had come to the city from Alderdale. Of these he and Vickie had known only a comparative few. How many of these, too, had vanished.

Doug did not waste any thought in speculation. His only concern was that with the bleak, terrible certainty that all further search for Vickie was hopeless. Out of the dead ashes of this knowledge, a new purpose rose. Grimly, he set a new and sterner task for himself—to find the cause of the disappearances.

* * * *

“A one-way ticket to Alderdale, please,” Doug told the ticket agent.

The man nodded and turned to the ticket racks behind him. He did not complete the movement. Halfway around, something seemed to halt him; he turned abruptly back to Doug.

“Did you say Alderdale?” His voice was almost a whisper, intense, a little breathless. His eyes sharpened with a kind of awed interest upon Doug’s face.

“Why, yes,” Doug replied warily, a little disconcerted by the other’s sudden change of manner. “I want a one-way ticket to Alderdale.”

The ticket agent placed his hands on the counter and leaned toward the grille which separated him from Doug. There was something ponderously confiding about his attitude, as if impelled by a consuming urge to make known something of the most tremendous importance.

“Look, young fellow, that’s a dangerous town to go to. If I were you, I’d stay away. Too much of a risk. Lots of people have been disappearing there.”

“I know that,” Doug said. “My ticket, please.”

The ticket agent took his hands from the counter and drew back, as though Doug had become someone with whom it would be safest not to be in close contact. His brows drew together over his staring eyes in a frown of incredulity.

“Sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked hesitantly.

“Quite,” Doug said. “And now, if you’re satisfied, will you please let me have my ticket?”

Shaking his head, muttering under his breath, the ticket agent complied. His manner throughout the transaction bore a markedly noticeable constraint.

The ticket finally in his possession, Doug picked up his bag and strode quickly toward the tracks.

He gnawed at his lower lip, his youthful features somber. The ticket agent’s warning had left him disturbed. Up to now, he had known only the firm resolve to get to the bottom of the disappearances. Knowledge that he would be exposing himself to danger by going to Alderdale had not entered his thoughts.

Realization came to him that he possessed nothing which might give hope of immunity. He was from Alderdale. He was young—just over the borderline of maturity himself. He was, in fact, perfect prey for whatever it was that had snatched all the others like him into oblivion.

He felt a twinge of anxiety that was not motivated by any concern for his own well-being. Loss of Vickie had left him with little if any desire for continued existence. But he did not want anything to happen to him until he had finally dragged the reason behind the disappearance into the light of day.

Doug found his coach, tossed his bag onto the overhead rack, settled into a seat. He gazed broodingly through the window, the disappointments of the past two weeks bitter in his mind.

He would have left for Alderdale immediately the day he learned of that other girl’s disappearance, but a hope that the police might turn up something had made him wait. The police had explored every possibility in their search for Vickie, utilizing every branch, every advantage, of their far-flung organization. But they had been so many men dipping nets into an ocean for one particular fish. They had been so many men in quest of a name, a description, that was not there.

There had been calls. Would Mr. Crandall appear at hospital so-and-so? An unidentified accident case who answered the description of Mrs. Crandall. The drive—fear and hope boiling under a flame of impatience, tension that pulled nerves to shrieking tightness, that brought sweat to clenching hands. And then—the smell of disinfectant, a slender form on a white-painted bed. Brown-gold hair spread over a pillow, eyes under closed lids that might have been brown. But not Vickie.

An amnesia case. Brown-gold hair again, brown eyes that watched him hungrily, eagerly, pleading to be known. But not Vickie.

The morgue. Lights that did not quite dispel the gloom, the cold, dank atmosphere of death. A harsh, stone slab, and a still, still form beneath a sheet. The sheet pulled partially away—Again not Vickie.

Not Vickie. Never Vickie. Vickie was a name for someone who had been, someone who had shared his tiny fragment of world for a while, and then gone. Vickie was the name of a memory.

* * * *

Doug was the only one off when the train reached Alderdale. Gripping his bag, he walked around the little depot building, down the gravel driveway, to the street. He walked slowly, glancing about him, eyes warm with a mingling of recollection and sadness.

Alderdale was not the town he remembered, in which he had lived and grown. Pathetic changes had taken place in the old, familiar scenes. Evidences of desertion and neglect were everywhere. Lawns had become overgrown with weeds, houses drab for lack of paint. Most of the houses were tenantless. For rent signs hung in almost every window.

People along the street were few, and those Doug passed were unknown to him. They stared in surprise when they noticed his bag, but when his glance met theirs, they averted their eyes, hurried away.

Sadness deepened within Doug. The friendly smile, the nod of head, which had been accorded even those who were not known, these, too, had become things of the past. Now there was only a distrust for those who seemed to be strangers, a fear that averted eyes, that brought haste to walking feet.

An atmosphere of menace; of lurking danger, hung over the town. Doug could sense it as though it were a smell in the air, a sound carried on the wind.

He registered at a hotel. Later he went out to see how many of relatives and acquaintances he could find. It was with these that his investigations would begin. And whether it would be the beginning of the end or merely the end of the beginning, he dared not guess.

The end of two days found him still lacking anything which might have even remotely been considered a lead. His relatives and friends, such few as had remained in Alderdale, were overjoyed to see him again. They were desolated at the news of Vickie’s disappearance. But they could offer nothing in the way of useful information.

Doug’s quest brought him inevitably to Chief of Police Hargood, who secluded himself with his memories of better days, of robberies and burglaries, in a musty little office in the town courthouse.

“It’s no use trying to dig up something here,” Hargood said, after Doug had recounted his story for the dozenth time. “The government sent a lot of investigation men, and they did a lot of snooping and prying, but it didn’t do any good. They all went back to Washington, or wherever they came from, without turning up a single thing. And I’ve been working on the disappearances ever since they started, and I’m no wiser than I was in the beginning.”

“But isn’t there something—anything—which might possibly be worked on?” Doug pleaded desperately.

Hargood scratched his unshaven jaw. “Well, there is, in a way. But I still think it’s just a lot of nonsense. Anyway, you might go over and have a talk with Doc Wanamaker. He lives near that Asherton place up on Cedar Creek Road. The Doc’s got what he calls a theory about the disappearances. Might be something in it, but personally I’d say the Doc likes to spin half-baked yarns in his old age.”

Doc Wanamaker—Sylvester P. Wanamaker, M. D., the faded shingle over the porch read—was short, plump, bald. He might have appeared jolly and bouncing were it not for the inscrutability of his eyes behind their thick-lensed glasses. The glasses somehow made a difference in his entire aspect. They gave an owl-like gravity to his full, red-cheeked face, made him at once knowing and unknown.

Doug was ushered cordially into an old-fashioned parlor, where he launched at once into an explanation of his visit. He finished, “Hargood told me you had a theory about the disappearances, and so I thought it would be a good idea to have a talk with you.”

Wanamaker emitted a chuckle which was dry and somehow bitter. “And I suppose Hargood told you also that I was mentally infirm if not downright crazy.”

Doug said gently, “Hargood’s opinion does not interest me in the slightest. He doesn’t know anything, hasn’t the ghost of an idea. Nobody has. You, at least, have a theory of what might be behind the disappearances. I have come to listen to your theory as a last hope, a last resort, not to use it to judge your sanity.”

Something of the inscrutability about Wanamaker’s eyes seemed to leave. It seemed to Doug that his words had torn away a barrier of reserve.

“Those are the kindest words I’ve heard in a long time,” Wanamaker stated softly. He reached abruptly for a blackened, curve-stemmed pipe lying on the table beside his chair, and for some seconds was occupied busily by stuffing it with tobacco. Finally he glanced up. He did not light the pipe, but turned it in his pudgy hands.

“I have a theory, yes. Those who have heard it, have called it half-baked, crack-pot, and several other things more descriptive. But if you have an open, imaginative mind, one not shackled by precedent, bound in by the narrow range of human experience, you’ll see that my theory has definite possibilities. I say possibilities. I shall not put myself on record as to whether or not my theory is true, since I lack the facts which would give me that right. But as a theory, a possible answer, it fits all the conditions better than anything which has yet been offered. Now—you’ve heard, no doubt, about the meteorite? The Meteorite?”

“The one that fell in Ned Johnson’s garden on Cressy Street? Why, yes,” Doug acknowledged, “that was around twenty-six years ago, sometime before I was born.”

“Before you were born,” Wanamaker said. “Remember that point. The fact that the meteorite fell before you were born—before all the others who finally disappeared were born—is of the most tremendous importance. The meteorite is the crux of everything.

“I’ll review a few facts about it, things which are more or less common knowledge, determined not by myself but by men in much more appropriate branches of science. The meteorite was composed of some strange kind of radioactive substance, enclosed in a shell of nickel-iron. This shell was almost totally burned away by descent of the meteorite through Earth’s atmosphere, but the radioactive interior was left intact. But it hadn’t remained radioactive long; some element in the atmosphere or in the ground caused the radiation rate to speed up enormously, changing it within a short time to a lead-like substance.

“Scientists who came to investigate the meteorite finally carried it away, placed it in a glass case in a university museum. But something had been left—something which could not be taken away. Something which was to mean tragedy and heartbreak in all the years that followed.” Wanamaker leaned forward; his eyes glittered behind their thick lenses.

“While active, the meteorite threw off hard radiation—infernally hard, harder than X-rays. I do not expect you to know the work that has been done with X-rays on fruit flies. But I think you will understand when I say that hard radiations of the type thrown off by the meteorite have the ability to alter the patterns of the genes and chromosomes, the carriers of hereditary characteristics in the human germ plasm. And what is the result of such alterations? Mutations occur in the offspring of those affected. The meteorite—” Wanamaker’s voice dropped to a whisper—“did just that. It caused mutations. As to how extensive this was—you’ve seen the hole in Ned Johnson’s garden?”

Doug nodded quickly. “It was big. About ten feet across.”

“The hole is no longer the sightseeing spot it once was,” Wanamaker resumed a trifle sadly. “But at that time, it was the most popular site in Alderdale. Before the meteorite was dug up, before it had ceased to be radioactive, everyone in town had turned out to see the hole. Your mother and father were there, as were Vickie’s mother and father, the mothers and fathers of all the others. They had not married yet, or perhaps they had been waiting for better financial circumstances before bearing children. But they came—and those terrifically hard radiations pouring from the hole caused changes in their germ cells.

“You’ve heard of the Monsters. The Monsters were mutants, born of parents whose germ cells had been altered by the radiations thrown off by the meteorite. But not all the children brought into the world were grotesque travesties of human beings. Many were normal—at least outwardly so. Actually, they, too, were mutants, but this fact was not to become evident until many years later, because of a sort of delayed-action timing.” Wanamaker looked at something beyond Doug, and his lips spread in a smile that was without humor.

“All my life I have never ceased to be astonished at the ingenuity and foresight of Nature. How well she provides for those of her children whom she favors! Plants and animals who have been favored are perfectly adapted to their environment, provided with every possible aid in the constant fight for survival. Look here—if an infant superman were to have appeared among the Monsters, with physical differences setting it distinctly apart from ordinary men, would it have been recognizable as a superman?”

Doug hesitated. “Well, I think that would have been rather difficult to determine.”

“Exactly!” Wanamaker said, beaming in approval. “Few if any of the Monsters were similar physically. If a superman had appeared among them, it would have been mistaken for just another Monster. It would have been confined in an institution, bound in by walls and bars for the rest of its life. Or, if allowed to live in the world of men, it would have been hounded and persecuted, shunned, mocked.

“But as I’ve said, Nature is ingenious and foresighted. If a superman were to appear whom she favored, he would not be recognizable as such—not until he was fully prepared to protect himself from the dangers with which we, the children of another race, might menace him.” Wanamaker’s eyes fixed upon Doug with a kind of owlish grimness. “That’s exactly what happened. Supermen did appear—and they were so favored.”

Doug stared. “You mean supermen appeared as a result of the radiations thrown off by the meteorite?”

“Yes,” Wanamaker answered quietly.

“But that seems a little too farfetched. It’s like something out of fantasy.”

“Why should it be?” Wanamaker demanded. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that in some long-gone time we were supermen ourselves, superseding other creatures of an inferior manlike race? We, too, are the result of a mutation. And remember, the radiations from the meteorite eventually died out, which means that they ranged through a wide scale of intensity from high to low, each degree of intensity producing a different change in the germ plasm. Is it too farfetched to suppose that one of those degrees of intensity produced supermen, whereas all the others resulted merely in Monsters?”

“I…I don’t know,” Doug faltered. “But what do supermen have to do with the disappearances?”

“Everything. Consider the facts. The disappearances began something over two years ago, at a time when the children of parents who had been affected by the radiation thrown off by the meteorite had reached maturity. Outwardly, these children were normal enough, but they were mutants. It was only when they reached maturity that the physical and mental changes which made them so became manifest. And why did the changes appear only when the children had reached maturity? Because maturity is a time when the individual is fully equipped mentally and physically to stand on his own feet. Because it is at maturity that a superman, finally recognizable as such, would be able to cope with his differentness.

“Thus the disappearances. Obviously, the changes which took place at maturity were so far-reaching that the mutants could live no longer in the world of ordinary men. They had to go somewhere where they could live in peace. Most likely they banded together, and even now are leading their strange lives in some hidden part of the earth.”

Doug moistened his lips. His voice was tense. “If what you have to say is true, then…then I, too, am due to disappear.”

Wanamaker lifted plump shoulders in a shrug. “If my theory is true. It has not yet been checked against fact, and until it is, who can say? Even if I did know for sure, I still would not be able to say, since I do not know all the factors involved in your own particular case.”

Theory. Uncertainty. If. The hopelessness of his quest filled Doug with crosscurrents of despair and rage. Everywhere he turned, it seemed, there was only disappointment.

* * * *

Hiding his dejection at the outcome of his visit as best he could, Doug took leave of Wanamaker. He returned to his room at the hotel, where he threw himself across the bed without bothering even to remove his coat. Elis fingers bit hard into the mattress, gripping convulsively, as though seeking solidity in a world which had suddenly become unsubstantial.

In the days that followed, the hotel room took on the quality of a prison cell to Doug. He had a desire for solitude that precluded any thought of boarding out, and finally he rented a small cottage on the outskirts of Alderdale. The loneliness of the place suited him ideally.

For a while he busied himself with putting the house in order, but when that was done an apathetic listlessness took hold of him.

He had no plans for the future.

Existence in the present was without hope or meaning. He sank into spells of brooding that became longer, ever longer.

Doug neglected himself, neglected the cottage. He grew thin and wan, and then he took sick. It started with a headache one morning, and by the following evening he was too weak to move. The headache grew terrible in its intensity. Every throb of his heart brought pain that threatened to split his head. A fever swept him like a consuming flame. Night brought merciful unconsciousness.

He awoke the next afternoon, feeble, shaken, but better. Hunger gnawed within him, an almost unnatural hunger, and he felt an overpowering thirst. He fell upon his small stock of food ravenously, drank dipper after dipper of water from the bucket which he filled outside at the well. He felt still better, then, but some inexplicable feeling of strangeness seemed to persist. His illness was gone, but somehow he felt—queer.

He could not quite define his sensations. It was as though he were in a state of flux, with a moving and a shifting in every cell of his body. In moments of physical quiet, sounds came to him that yet were not sounds, for strain as he might with listening, they could not be heard.

The sensation continued, grew stronger. Something like an electric current thrilled through every fiber of his being. An activity filled his mind that was not thought. A flow of sound filled his ears that was not sound. An awareness of his surroundings deepened within him, a sharpening of perceptions, that made him see things, sense things, in ways he had never experienced before.

It continued—and then all wonder, all feeling of strangeness, left him. The transformation was complete.

He stood there, in the growing darkness of evening, with his golden aura pulsing around him, and he strained with his listening, not using his ears. His mind—his new mind—reached out and away, a hand fumbling in the darkness, seeking guidance. And it came—just as his new senses told him it would come.

“It is over?”

“Yes.”

“You are ready?”

“Yes…oh, yes!”

The ship came for him, later, a silver bubble floating down out of the night. It touched ground gently; a circular opening appeared. Through the opening a figure ran. He did not need his eyes to know that her hair was brown-gold, that her eyes were brown.

“Vickie! Vickie!”

“Doug!”

There was no sound that could be heard. Just a man-figure and a woman-figure, two auras that blended into one.